


Beyond The Physics Of It

by Trojie



Series: The moment of truth in your lies [1]
Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Angst, Dreams, Genderbending, Minor Violence, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-16
Updated: 2010-10-16
Packaged: 2017-10-12 17:30:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,779
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/127257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trojie/pseuds/Trojie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Forgery isn't as simple as it looks. In which Arthur explains nothing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Beyond The Physics Of It

People say 'in your dreams' as if your dreams were restricted to the unattainable and the wonderful and the desirable.

Dreaming, to Eames, is how he attains most things - wonders and desires sometimes, yes. Or scars. Regrets. Odd twitches. Flashes of accents that aren't his sometimes, or bizarre and shortlived fondnesses for, say, garters.

He is dreaming now.

Outside, Arthur's projections are picketing the hotel and throwing the odd firebomb, but this place has sixteen floors and some fairly tricky loops Eames picked up off an architect in Helsinki a few years ago. Eames isn't worried. He built this dream to be hard to navigate, because projections get so fussy about people making changes.

(Arthur's projections shouldn't be here, they're supposed to be suppressed, he's supposed to be a _professional_ , and Eames is going to be pissed if he gets gunned down by Arthur's subconscious, but he doesn't want to ask.)

It's a hotel room, the same as every hotel room; the rest of the furnishings an afterthought when compared to the mirrors on the wall, angled to catch every facet of a form. Not Eames's form though, right now - Arthur's.

Eames is only involved in this job peripherally. All he knows is Arthur (tersely, in response to direct questions only) says Eames can't do this one, that it has to be him, and that he has to be someone else. He won't tell Eames any other details, even of who else is involved, although Eames assumes Cobb, at least. Arthur just showed up at arse o'clock this morning (at the London flat Eames was under the impression no-one else knew about), and asked for help.

He looked haggard, for Arthur, and Eames let him in without a word, because that look on the face of a man you know has no compunctions about throwing himself off a building if he has to, even in a dream, is never a good thing.

Dawn comes up, and they dream together, and don't see it.

It's ridiculous, because Arthur has no talent for this. He has talent for a lot of things Eames can't do, and he has learnt to be competent at even more things besides, but this is something you can't fake competency at, and he won't give up, and this slowness is frustrating. Two hours in the real world is a day in a dream, and they have to be coming up on that now.

( _'Arthur, this is idiocy. Just tell me the details, I'll do the damn job.'_

 _'Won't work.'_ )

Arthur's determined, he has to have some other shape. Someone who isn't him, and Eames has to teach him.

There is a flicker to the left and to the right, and Arthur is standing next to Eames just as she has been all the time they've been in here ... _She_.

'Well?' she asks, and she holds it even though her lips move and her eyes widen.

Eames's hands are careful, impersonal, as he slides them over the shape of Arthur from the back, all done up tight in a black evening dress, her arms crossed in front of her so that from this vantage point he can see, and check, every line of her body.

Arthur follows his every move with her eyes in the mirrors, as if she's taking notes on his procedures.

(Outside the locked hotel-room door, a mere couple of floors away, Arthur's projections are rioting in the hallways.)

Eames asked Arthur what he wants the mark's reaction to be, but Arthur was reticent, so he shrugged and gave him Paula, someone he's seen Eames use often enough to be familiar with her, someone that Eames knows is both extremely useful, and extremely unlike Arthur, which seems to fit the bill.

( _'There has to be some kind of framework. Tell me what it takes.'_

 _'It takes imagination.'_

 _'Not good enough. Why can't Cobb forge, then? He can build. If imagination was the only thing, we wouldn't need you.'_

 _A sigh. 'You have to let go, Arthur. That's all it takes.'_

 _Dark eyes snap up. '_ Be _someone else,' he says slowly, 'not just look like them.'_ )

Truth be told, Arthur's a rubbish forger, and will always be a rubbish forger. But now that he has this shape, he _has_ it. Eames has taught it to him in glorious detail and he's rote-learned it; the exact tint of the irises and the texture of the skin on the underside of the forearms, and the freckles on the left ankle (you have to give Arthur specifics, Eames knows this, they help him grasp ideas), but he's been struggling to _inhabit_ it, to be it so that Eames can see it, until now.

'You're getting it,' Eames says, tracing the angle between hips and ribcage measuringly. Without thinking, he says, 'If I were the mark, I'm sure you'd have your legs around my head and your panties hanging off the light fittings by now.' He regrets it the second he says it. In the real world he might talk about Arthur's panties, might call him 'darling' and try to irritate the man into some kind of reaction, but not while they're working, and this is work. Instead, he steps away, puts his hands back into his pockets and regards her again as she turns around.

(There's the not-distant-enough sound of gunfire and a tiny hint of smoke in the air. Eames ignores it.)

Her face is nothing like Arthur's, but she regards him with that faint shadow of amusement and disdain he always associates with Arthur, overlaid with something else, something paler and painful. She's trying to hide it, which Arthur might be an expert at in his own form, but not in this one.

Arthur coughs. 'And if you were a mark, and you got past my panties, would I still convince you?' she asks drily.

As she says it, the familiar, male Arthur flickers in the mirror to the left. 'Concentrate,' Eames murmurs, distracted from the question by the job at hand. 'Don't think like Arthur. Think like her.' Arthur nods, closes her eyes for a second, and then smiles, a natural, pretty smile, and the reflection matches again.

(Every time she falters and becomes a tiny bit him again, there's an explosion. It's probably pipebombs, maybe fertiliser, but Eames thinks of matter and antimatter - Arthur's mind doesn't like being overlaid.)

'Remember what I told you,' Eames says. 'It's the emotion, the mental presence, that's important here. The mark's mind can't see the physical details - those are just for you, to remind yourself who you're playing - he'll feel them instead, he'll see the person he's expecting. The person who thinks like her.'

Arthur nods again, like she's thinking hard about this. There's a sudden bloom of intimacy in the air, and she takes a step forward into Eames's space, drapes a delicate, long-boned hand over his shoulder, and Eames feels like she wants him, and _that_ , there, is when he knows Arthur will pull this job off, whatever it is.

'Darling - ' he says, without thinking, and she kisses him. Her hands come up to cradle his face and he wraps his arms around her neat, delicious waistline, and holds on.

Eames knows how Paula goes about things, but he keeps tasting hints of Arthur in there - in the focus, in the heat and the determination and the way she holds him so hard against her body.

(The projections are on the floor below now, the noise is indescribable, the place is _shaking_ , the lampshades rattling, and Arthur kisses him through it.)

She bears him to the bed, which he'd never bothered imagining a decent mattress for, and dumps her heels over the edge, crawling into his lap. He runs his fingers up over the rucked-up fabric of her dress.

'Are you sure?' he asks, and she pulls herself away long enough to regard him with a solemnity he recognises all too well, underscored by a _whompf_ and a smell of vapourised petrol outside the door.

'This isn't what Arthur would do right now,' she says. 'So I want to do it.'

He should argue, he should point out the encroaching hordes, he should be a gentleman and offer her the gun, but instead he falls back and drags her on top of him.

She turns the tables on him, her legs strong and her grip sharp as she rolls them over, and he scrabbles back down the bed, possessed by an idea.

The lesson endeth with Arthur's legs wrapped around Eames's head, Eames desperate to see how long Arthur can hold this forgery. She makes noises like she'd never thought, never considered anything like this, and Eames gets lost in the fact that this is Arthur, Arthur whose last name he's not even allowed to know, who acts like in all the world the only thing he wants is to get things right, moaning out Eames's name.

Eames comes in his trousers like a teenager while bringing Arthur off, two fingers slid home into a space that's never existed before, that only exists now because Arthur wills it to be so, and, grinding mindlessly against the too-hard mattress with the impossible taste of her to ground him and the clamour of the mob outside the door, he comes harder than he ever remembers coming before.

Arthur holds the shape, the forgery, just long enough for Eames to disentangle himself from her legs and crawl up the bed because he wants to hold her, and then she gets up without letting him touch her, quiet and dignified as Arthur always is, and goes to the bathroom. Just before the door shuts Eames sees the female curves he knows so well, that he's worn countless times himself and taught pore by pore to Arthur replaced by hard, unfamiliar male lines that he's never been allowed to see before, and then there's the clicking of a latch, a few tiny, wet sounds, a _groan_ bitten viciously off, and then ...

Gunshot.

Eames wakes up to the sound of his work mobile ringing shrilly somewhere under a pile of papers. Arthur's gone, the PASIV with him - there's just a faint track-mark in Eames's wrist to tell him that he didn't dream that all up himself. The post-coital haze making wax of his bones is in stark contrast to the erection tenting his trousers.

It takes him a few tries to locate the phone, and when he does, it's a text from an unknown number.

 _that wasn't meant to happen. i'm sorry_.

Two days later, Eames finds out about Mallory Cobb, and realises that Arthur's con wasn't about fooling anyone but himself.


End file.
